Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/A.I.

Movie Guru Rating:
Enlightening (4 out of 5)

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Despite its faults, A.I. offers a summer spectacle worth seeing.

by Coury Turczyn

There isn't a film release this summer that critics have anticipated more. Forget The Mummy Returns, Tomb Raider, or even Pearl Harbor—all of those pathetic efforts were but morsels compared to the feast that would come with the unveiling of A.I. Sure, there's pleasure to be had in flicking the crumbs of Swordfish or The Animal off our plates, but with A.I. we critics would at last have a plump turkey to really sink our knives into.

You couldn't have dreamt up a more appealing target: a collaboration between the two film directors that critics most love to hate, Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick. Wow. Not only does this allow us to scorn Kubrick's aloof misanthropy, but we can ridicule Spielberg's naive sentimentality, too—all in one review! I imagine critics' knives were drawn and sharpened repeatedly months ago, just waiting to deliver the killing blows.

To be sure, the blows did come with A.I.'s release, but they've been glancing ones. For all its faults, A.I. is a successful fusion of two rather disparate cinematic visions, an amalgamation that is more thought-provoking, ambitious, and imaginative than anything else Hollywood has offered this year.

The assignment for Spielberg was a challenging one. A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) was a project that Kubrick had been developing in secret for almost two decades. The two directors had discussed it on and off for a few years; with Kubrick's death in 1999, Spielberg decided to honor his friend by completing the film with his own script. But could he remain true to Kubrick's darker views on human nature and still make a "Spielberg" picture? It wasn't out of the question to expect total disaster, an ill-fitting union of each director's worst flaws: Kubrick's detachment from his characters and Spielberg's desire for easy moral lessons. While A.I. does indeed reflect those faults, it also has flashes of each director's brilliance.

Kubrick's story (inspired by Brian Aldiss' short story "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long") envisions another dark future for us, with a society immersed in the aftermath of melted ice caps yet still able to revel in its own decadence. Life-like humanoid robots are used not only for labor, but also as sex partners; once they're outdated or used up, they're discarded like old toys. But what if a robot was created not for sex but for genuine love? Would we have an obligation to return that love? Could that love really be disposed of like any other product?

Ah, another prickly moral dilemma from Mr. Kubrick. But where Kubrick would have subtly posed those questions over the course of the film, Spielberg has a character just blurt them out in the opening scene, where super-scientist William Hurt lectures his science team (as well as us). After that wooden start, A.I. jumps into the real story: showing what happens when robot-boy David (Haley Joel Osment) is inserted into a family whose real son is cryogenically frozen due to an incurable disease.

The next hour is creepier than anything Spielberg has ever filmed, perceptively envisioning the emotional reactions of a mother (Frances O'Connor) to her surrogate child and its mechanized devotion; Kubrick probably couldn't have pulled off something so intensely personal. Although often criticized for it, Spielberg does indeed empathize with his child characters, and A.I. benefits from it; he adeptly exposes childhood fears of abandonment, even from the perspective of a robot. Osment is (fittingly) unreal; although quite robotic in his early scenes, he nevertheless inspires a growing sympathy for his character, particularly when the parents' real son returns from the hospital, forcing him to compete for their love.

The second half of A.I. follows David after he's been abandoned in some woods by his former family; programmed to love his mother, he vows to become human as Pinocchio did so she'll love him back. But, since he's also programmed to be a child, he really believes in the Pinocchio fairy tale and thus tries to find the Blue Fairy who'll turn him into a real boy. Along his quest, he is befriended by sex-bot Gigolo Joe (an amazing, entertaining Jude Law), falls into a Flesh Fair where robot-hating spectators watch rogue mechas get gruesomely executed, travels through the Vegas-like Rouge City where he gets advice from a wizard, and at last finds his destiny in a haunting, submerged Manhattan. The imagery throughout is remarkable, with compositions and production designs that hang like dreamy residues in the mind long after you leave the theater.

While there are annoyances here and there (Robin Williams for the wizard's voice? Could Spielberg have possibly chosen a more jarring voice actor to destroy our suspension of disbelief?)—and the film does run about 20 minutes too long—I couldn't help but be amazed at Spielberg's masterful melding of his and Kubrick's ideas. Until the ending, that is.

Without giving anything away, let us simply say he should've stopped the film five minutes earlier. Instead, he charges over the apex and falls straight down into the pits of sentimentality in which he's so often accused of being mired. Nevertheless, A.I. offers more food for thought, more pure cinema, than any other Hollywood blockbuster you're likely to see this summer.